Everyone wants to be a Chloé girl. She’s the nicest of the popular girls from your high school; the aspiring ballet dancer you rarely saw because she took the afternoons off to take classes at the ballet conservatory. She’s impossibly long-limbed, graceful, glossy-haired with little effort. Roses de Chloé is the fragrance she wears to class.
It’s a rosy take on the immediate runaway hit of Chloé’s classic Eau de Parfum. Although I loved the original velvety, clean blend of peonies and amber, I had to give it up because I started smelling myself … everywhere. I smelled myself on passersby on the street, in elevators, and in the bathrooms of fancy restaurants and clubs, where it was among the selection of perfumes that bathroom attendants collected on a tray. And my memory bank of the fragrance became associated with those places rather than with the olfactory equivalent of sun-dappled skin.
Roses de Chloé gives me a new, charmed version of the original. It smells like ballerinas off-duty sunning themselves during a break in class — calling to mind Chloé’s spring 2011 ballerina-inspired collection. It takes the elements of the original Chloé, but ups the rose notes, producing a slightly sweeter, but not saccharine, scent that unfurls into something more delicate. The rose is sweet but robust, innocent but womanly. It comes in a blush pink-tinged bottle like the original, and feels like a fragrance you wear in your twenties to remember your more girlish days. And as a limited edition, my memory bank of the fragrance remains all my own.
Check out the “Blowing Roses” ad for the fragrance below, showing Chloé ballerina girls, who whirl a dervish to mimic falling rose petals in a sequence choreographed by the French company I Could Never Be a Dancer.